Docent lecture – Dimosthenis Kifokeris

Production in the Swedish construction sector is currently facing various interconnected challenges. Among those, urgent demands on carbon neutrality, as well as shaping work and management practices to further improve productivity and the collaboration between construction project stakeholders (e.g., contractors and clients) are contributing to the sustainable transformation of the production model – both regarding planning, executing, and managing production processes, and the evolution of relevant professional roles (such as new clients’ requirements, and new contractors’ skills). To underpin this sustainable transformation, this lecture will highlight results from two selected research projects outlining a broader field of construction management and production.

The first project focuses on carbon-neutral production and the potential of emission-free construction sites in Gothenburg using electric vehicles (e.g., excavators, wheel loaders). These sites ranged from buildings erected in a dense urban setting, to earthworks in neighborhood parks. As it turns out, adopting such vehicles is set to transform production planning and execution (e.g., via considering charging times in-between building activities throughout the workday) and professional roles connected to the project at hand (e.g., clients incentivizing investment in electric vehicles, and contractors conceptualizing site layouts around those vehicles’ operation).

The second project focuses on a nation-wide survey investigating the level on which hundreds of Swedish contractors are practicing lean construction while managing their projects and collaboration with the clients. Lean construction is, broadly, a set of construction management methods and tools aiming at increasing value for the client by eliminating project activities that waste time and resources (like errors and reworks on the construction site, or material delivery delays during production). It is shown that Swedish contractors are using different lean construction variants that evolve along the transformation of the production model, and specifically according to each firms’ practices, the scope of different building processes, and the changing client demands (incl. the improvement of on-site productivity, and sustainability in production).

Concluding, the lecture will outline developing research directions that can further aid the sustainable transformation of Swedish construction production in the near and not-so-near future.